A Special Unicorn Project #2: Finally An Actual Start

Well in the first installment of this series I talked a lot about my ideas for this project. Ideas were pretty much all there was to it though. Then for various reaasons I haven’t been able to get into my shop to do anything after that. Well, I finally got to actually start on this. First things first, I had to actually lay out some of my ideas on paper. So I pulled out the patterns for the general shape of the unicorn, which is to be based loosely on the carousel horse plans. Then I had to do a lot of doctoring to those plans to get them to look the way I wanted and be stable enough for a child to ride on.Most of my changes had to do with the legs. The original design of this horse is a carousel horse where the legs don’t actually contact the rocker assembly. The entire horse suspends on an inch and a quarter pole. That looks great as a show piece, but doesn’t lend much stability. The photo above shows what I came up with. This of course isn’t the final end all of what it will be though. I usually make changes as I go anyway when I start sanding and shaping. However, this one didn’t even make it that far. Before I even finished gluing up panels to start cutting shapes, I kept looking at the rear legs as I had them laid out and something just didn’t look right. I forgot to take photos afterwards, but I did change the rear legs. So the first thing I had to do was to glue up panels big enough for the various parts. So I cut and glued up panels until I ran out of clamps. Then I had to let them dry.Then I cut and glued up more.At the end of today though, I have all the panels glued up to cut the parts of the unicorn’s body. I hope to start cutting tomorrow.